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Volunteers sign up to help with cemetery transcribing

The Fort Frances Museum will be holding a cemetery transcribing inventory project here Saturday under the direction of Art Gunnell of the Ontario Genealogical Society.

The survey was organized in an effort to preserve Fort Frances history and collect information that will help in the writing of the 2003 Centennial History Book.

“There are a number of historical resources in the community that people are not aware of,” said museum curator Pam Hawley. “Graveyards are very rich in information but very few people ever think of them as a source of history.

“I think there is a tendency for people to overlook them as a viable source of information,” she added.

Volunteers will meet at the museum at 9 a.m., where they will participate in an orientation session before making their way to the cemetery for a day-long inventory.

“Mr. Gunnell will be on hand to give our volunteers a briefing on how to transcribe and what information they have to record,” Hawley noted.

“This is a big project and it is important to preserve this history. Many monuments begin to disintegrate as a result of the weather,” she noted. “Once that information is lost, it is often permanently lost.

“In order to preserve the history of our community, it is important that we have projects like this,” she stressed.

More than a dozen people have signed up to help out but Hawley is hoping even more will volunteer.

“We can always use more people,” she said. “This is a large [task] and the more people we have, the better it will be.”

For more information on the project, contact Hawley at the museum (274-7891).